Delivering your vision

1843 Magazine

Website rebrand and relaunch

Services

Beginning March 2016, publisher Economist Group relaunched and rebranded its high-end magazine, Intelligent Life, with a new name, look and feel. The new brand was named 1843 for the year The Economist was founded.
The strategy was to relaunch the magazine as a global publication targeting well-educated, affluent readers around the world. We helped them to transform the existing Intelligent Life website launched in October, 2015 to meet the business needs of the relaunch and rebrand.

The Challenge

The aim of the relaunch was to broaden and enhance the coverage of 1843 beyond Europe to include America and Asia. The new magazine includes profiles of headline-makers from The Economist, a fashion shoot in every issue and in-depth travel narratives. The magazine also extended its coverage to new sections devoted to tech, food and drink, art, design, and body and mind. The redesigned site had a specific aim to go live on March 9 2016 to coincide with the print issue hitting newsstands with an April/May cover. We had to ensure that the very same day the website went live smoothly with all the new functionalities, features, as well as all former Intelligent Life content and social accounts. The app also transitioned from Intelligent Life to 1843.

The Solution

Following the designs provided by the 1843 team we built a fully responsive tile based layout for the website and adjusted the existing page layouts to align with the brand changes.

To get the best out of the layout possibilities we provided full editorial control over the home page and section page tiles with a lot of possible permutations of colours, opacity, sizes and positions of the images, texts and overlays. Due to the complexities of the design, the styling needed to be well maintained and flexible. We created a number of pieces of custom functionality to support this, allowing rapid adjustments to fonts, spacing and layout.

We also provided the editorial team with the possibility to make different dimension image crops from one single uploaded high resolution image to ensure the appropriate display on different size tiles. To help the editorial team create the best look for the article tiles we created preview functionality that allows the editors to check the end result before publishing the article to live.

Besides re-theming the existing Drupal 7 website, we also created new content types and adjusted a few existing ones to support the new website functionality. The app delivered to Android and iOS devices is also fed by the site, and the templates for it were updated accordingly.

The information architecture of the site was adjusted to meet the new content strategy and business requirements. It was essential to ensure appropriate redirection of former Intelligent Life website content after switching to 1843magazine.com

The project required SEO and website security improvements that we delivered in collaboration with The Economist team.

As the website went live without a paywall, 1843 relies more heavily on advertising for revenue. We improved and built more flexible advertising possibilities to create more commercial opportunities for brand partners. With these, they can create highly customised content in partnership with the editorial team, particularly around in-stream video ads.

We have also enabled Etear advertisement preview functionality to provide the editors with the possibility to check the correct display of advertisements before publishing them.

The Economist Group

Audra Martin, Vice President, Strategy & Operations for 1843 and The World In

The Cameron & Wilding team provided great Drupal expertise for our launch of 1843 magazine. Throughout the project they were not just professional, but easy to work with and focused on the overall success of our business.

The Key Benefits

During the well-structured and productive project a lot was delivered in a very short period of time. The result being a really appealing website with enhanced editing tools that provide a lot of flexibility to the editorial team.

Improved imagery with a lot of built in flexibility

Full editorial control over the tiles with a lot of possible permutations

Very complex project was delivered in a short period of time

Improved security and SEO

A smooth transition from Intelligent Life to 1843.

Website statistics, comparing the results to the same period last year (March 7 to May 19th for both years):